Mean time-to-respond (MTTR) is the average time it takes to achieve system recovery after a failure or cyberattack. It is calculated from the moment the issue is first detected to the moment normal operations can resume.
MTTR doesn’t take into account the period of time that a problem remains undetected on the network. A different incident response metric called Mean Time-to-Detect (MTTD) covers that time period.
Incident response teams use MTTR as a metric for understanding and improving security performance. Reducing this metric leads to faster incident resolution and lower overall risk.
Organizations with fast incident recovery time metrics are able to repair issues quickly, reduce outage periods, and make downtime incidents less severe overall. Since downtime can cost enterprise organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour, incident management teams have a strong motivation to streamline their operations as much as possible.
Enabling incident response teams to address high-risk alerts and mitigate potential damage quickly essential to business continuity. The faster the resolution process is, the less time cybercriminals have at their disposal during an attacker incident.
Incident management metrics like MTTR have a direct correlation with the success and consistency of incident management systems. This translates to higher levels of customer trust, improved availability of products, and more efficient operations overall.
Both MTTR and MTTD provide actionable insights into the effectiveness of security operations against cyber threats. This data helps leaders demonstrate continuous improvement in a measurable way. Auditors and stakeholders can observe the number of minutes of downtime caused by security incidents go down over time.
At the same time, security specialists can use this valuable metric to improve their cybersecurity incident response workflows. They can identify opportunities to improve detection speed and gain deeper insights into their alert management tools and operating procedures.
To calculate MTTR, you must first collect data on all security incidents in a certain period of time. Add up the amount of time spent restoring systems to normal operations for each incident, then divide by the total number of incidents.
For example, imagine your company experienced three cybersecurity incidents in the last quarter. The first incident took 30 minutes to mitigate, the second took 45 minutes, and the third took two hours.
Your MTTR for this period would be:
Some factors can influence the accuracy and relevance of common incident metrics like MTTR. For example, an outlier event that takes dramatically longer to resolve can skew the metric. Similarly, treating a simple, rapidly automated cyberattack as a series of individual incidents can make your MTTR seem much smaller than it really is.
Organizations that want to streamline their incident response capabilities can reduce MTTR by investing in tools, technologies, and services that enable faster incident recovery times. Investing in the following capabilities can help achieve that:
Many security leaders face difficulties improving common incident management metrics like MTTR. Some of the issues that frequently become obstacles to best-in-class detection and response performance include:
MTTR is just one of the metrics security leaders use to measure the performance of the incident response team. Since it doesn’t include the amount of time it takes to detect suspicious activity or the amount of time between incidents, it’s not a complete measure of security performance.
To gain a clearer picture of overall security preparedness, security leaders should adopt a balanced approach that includes MTTR and MTTD together, along with any service level agreement metrics included in their contracts with security vendors and managed service providers.
